tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36930068.post3971356115949409158..comments2008-03-27T13:50:52.558+11:00Ian Yiphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07620054411151781462noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36930068.post-74378738775809401122008-03-27T13:50:52.558+11:002008-03-27T13:50:52.558+11:00Ian,<BR/> <BR/>We appreciate your interest in our maXecurity product line.<BR/><BR/>The technology team at P2 Security has been deploying conventional Web Access Management solutions at medium to large enterprises for the better part of a decade. It was our experience with deployment, maintenance and compliance issues that motivated us to develop our appliance-based maXecurity solution.<BR/><BR/>With maXecurity, we have adopted a "fewer moving parts" philosophy, and have collapsed the conventional three layer architecture (web agents or proxies + policy servers + policy store) to a two layer architecture (proxy appliances + policy store). We see this as a distinct advantage in terms of hardware cost, as well as deployment and maintenance effort, all of which translate to a lower total cost of ownership for our customers. Since a maXecurity solution includes hardware, customers are not required to acquire and deploy any additional hardware or software for a policy server layer. Also, no OS-level system administrators are required to maintain Unix- or Windows-based policy servers. Between hardware and IT staff, we have observed large enterprises (with 100s of thousands of users and hundreds of protected web applications) spending millions of dollars per year on WAM policy servers. By eliminating the policy server layer, these costs can be avoided, with the resulting savings allowing customers to achieve ROI in a matter of months.<BR/><BR/>With regard to your question: "...how [do] they manage security policies when someone decides to buy more than 1 appliance," maXecurity appliances are grouped into clusters that share the same policy configuration. All policy information is maintained in a centralized LDAP policy store. Policy changes are made from any appliance, written to the policy store, and all other appliances in the same cluster will detect the changes in the policy store and enforce them locally. Any combination of maXecurity Basic (500 users), maXecurity Pro (5000 users) and maXecurity Enterprise (50000 users) appliances can make up a cluster, allowing a maXecurity infrastructure to scale from the smallest to the largest enterprise.<BR/><BR/>I hope that I've addressed your questions regarding our maXecurity product line.<BR/><BR/>Jeff Gresham<BR/>Chief Technology Officer<BR/>P2 Security LLCJeffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16686832802396979210noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-36930068.post-19636381439926567682008-03-21T08:47:49.644+11:002008-03-21T08:47:49.644+11:00I've been asking myself exactly that same question. Why do big vendors don't provide a WAM appliance? The answer is simple. They only care about big and rich customers, which by now all have such a system in place. So why bother. The early adopter phase for WAM is long gone. The investment in such an appliance would never be paid back. Certainly not if you see all these small vendors providing low cost solutions based on Linux boxes. If you want to beat them, go for an appliance based federation solution. Big vendors only make money out of this business because early-adopting rich customers are prepared to spend loads of money on services to get these solutions in place. Beat them !!Nilsnoreply@blogger.com